Microsoft acquired NCompass Labs and its software NCompass Resolution became Microsoft Content Management Server (MCMS).
for example, let's say that a company has ten web developers, and the same company has 1000 authors who contribute content to the site. in the old world, those 1000 people would rely upon the ten stressed out web developers to add their content to the site. it doesn't make any sense for those 1000 people to rely upon the ten. also, it doesn't make sense to train 1000 people to use HTML just so that they can add their own material on the site.
that's where MCMS rides in on the strapping steed. the software separates the technical aspects of web page design from the rather trivial matter of adding content (which is often just text) to the site. under the web content model, the developers put time in at the beginning of the process to design the look and feel and decide exactly what they want authors to be able to do. once the site goes live, authors simply have to cut and paste (or drag and drop) their content directly into templates that the developers built. the formatting can be locked down so that the innocent authors can't make any mistakes that would break the look and feel of the site. of course, it also offers a web browser client interface.
MCMS is a dynamic web server. most sites are hard coded and they appear as they were coded. if someone wants to add a link or a page, they must change the code and re-publish the affected pages. MCMS helps this whole process happen automatically. it can do this because MCMS pages are not flat (.htm or .html) files. everything in MCMS is stored in a SQL Server database. the presentation of the data is not decided until someone asks for it. the page decides what it looks like when a browser views it. using our Application Programming Interface (API) developers can design their pages so that they change as content is added to the site. for example, a common application of our API is programming the site navigation so that new pages appear automatically. you can imagine the time that is saved coding HTML when all of the pages add themselves to the navigation links - and this is only one example.
the MCMS API is very flexible and allows developers to do all sorts of things. MCMS runs on Microsoft's Internet Information Services (IIS) so the API programming happens in ASP (VBscript and JavaScript) (the MCMS API now supports .Net).
benefits of MCMS
1. ease of content management.
on our sites, users (with rights) can login through a browser and alter web pages as easy as they would a Microsoft Word document
2. dynamic database
unlike traditional web sites MCMS stores information in a database. as soon as someone approves a change to the site, it becomes available dynamically. since MCMS is designed primarily for large organizations, having a scalable DB solution is very powerful
3. powerful and flexible programming interface (API).
although Resolution is entirely usable out of the box, MCMS has an amazing API. through this interface web pages become programming objects. for example, a developer can ask for a web page and find out properties like Name, Publishing Date, URL etc. the API guide is over 700 pages long.
Source: http://geeklit.blogspot.com/2005/05/about-content-management-server.html
